Smith was a one-man literary movement, an alpha and omega unto
himself. Although a major early fantasy innovator whom many later
writers credit as an influence, he did not begin an ongoing trend in
fantasy fiction as some other pioneers did. Contrariwise, he seems to
have borrowed his style from almost no one. He was, and is, a unique
and unclassifiable talent in the field of fantastic literature. His
uniqueness accounts for how little he is published or read today, even
though his name always finds its way into discussions of his two
compatriots at the pulp magazine Weird Tales, H. P. Lovecraft
and Robert E. Howard. But while they continue to find larger and
larger readerships with mainstream editions of their work, Smith has
fallen into limbo.

Clark Ashton Smith lived most of his life in Auburn, California, near
the foothills of the Sierras in the placer mining region. Today the
city of Auburn proudly celebrates its Gold Rush history in its
beautifully maintained historic district. But the shade of the city's
greatest artist (not only in prose, but also in poetry, sculpture, and drawing; the
illustration above is one of his works) remains elusive. Outside of the historic
buildings and
the gleaming city hall on its private hill, Auburn is a bland
contemporary suburb of Sacramento, filled with traffic jams on the
freeway, chain hotels, and strip malls packed with Targets, McDonalds,
and Best Buys. Considering that Smith once wrote that "America's worst
enemy is not Bolshevism but its own rank and shameless commercialism,"
I have no problem imagining what he might think of his hometown
today.

On a visit to Auburn, I tried to dig up as much of Clark Ashton Smith
as I could. The library keeps a collection of his rare volumes, the
folks who run the used bookstores know a bit about his work, and the
small residential street where his house once stood (burned down long
ago) now bears his name: 'Poet Smith.' But otherwise you could hardly
imagine a less congenial setting for a writer whom a recent anthology
dubbed 'The Emperor of Dreams.'

But dreams always transcend their surroundings; that is what makes
them dreams. As I lay on my bed in the Auburn Motel 6 during a
sweltering late spring evening, listening to teenagers on the street
below argue about where they should get their pizza for the night, I
flipped through the pages of a collection of Smith's stories and
marveled at the feeling of his prose filtering up from the ground
where he spent most of his life. Even surrounded by the dull hum of an
air conditioning and the deadening white light of the overhead lamp,
and lying on a cheap paisley-pattern comforter, I could read Smith's
words and find myself in lands so removed from the ordinary, so
enraptured with the power of language, and so intoxicated with
transcendent peculiarity that everything within the reach of my senses
vanished and surrendered to Smith's enchantment.

There is a strange comfort in reading a special author whom you know
so few other people have experienced. Ray Bradbury said it best:
"Smith always seemed, to me anyway, a special writer for special
tastes; his fame was lonely. Whether or nor it will ever be more than
lonely, I cannot say. Every writer is special in some way, and those
who are more than ordinarily special are either damned or lost along
the way." Knowing that they won't damn Clark Ashton Smith, and that
they are willing to recover what of his might be lost, gives his fans
a sense of closeness to him.

However, it still seems tragic that such a talented and influential
author should go so unknown today. The modern press, busy getting new
books on the shelves to satiate readers who hunger only for fresh
material, often lets the precious heritage of older fantasy literature
slip away. Although Clark Ashton Smith's writing will never have
widespread appeal because of his ornate style, he should at least have
a few paperbacks on the shelves of the local Barnes & Noble.

This series of four essays on the man whom H. P. Lovecraft once
jocularly named in mock Egyptian 'Klarkash-Ton' represent my
contribution to spreading the mysteries of his particular religion:
the wonder of words in arcane worlds.

The Word Dervishes of Klarkash-Ton

Clark Ashton Smith considered himself, before all else, a poet. He first made his
literary name with his bizarre, cosmic verse. His fiction displays
this origin at each opportunity. A poet expresses in concentrated form
the resonance of the word and the rhythm of its placement. Likewise,
Smith's stories concentrate on the effect of the weaving of
words; plot and character come a distant second in importance. To
Smith, words were like the tricks, dips, and pirouettes of a dance
routine. For most writers, to move pleasingly to the rhythms of the
music of language is a significant achievement. But Smith filled his
dances with arabesques, leaps and, jaw-dropping aerials. However, his
tricks weren't merely present to dazzle the audience; they fit with
the strange music he had chosen, and their cumulative effect was to
create a complete and seamless performance.

His best work does leave a strong emotional residue, but most of that
comes from the thick brew of strange words that seem to dwell in the
depths of a dictionary that no mortal has ever dared to fathom—except
for the esteemed Mr. Smith. He does not tell a story so much as he
invites the reader to experience sensations and emotions. The
sensations are ancient, sometimes cosmic. The emotions are often
unpleasant: decrepit horror, but more often loss and regret.

Because the concept of environment dominates all Clark Ashton Smith's
work, he avoided the use of series characters. Instead of basing his
stories around a single protagonist, as Howard and most other pulp
writers did, he based them around locations. Three of these fantasy
locales formed a large chunk of his output: Zothique, Hyperborea, and
Averoigne. In later installments of my survey of Smith's fantasy works
I will examine Zothique and Hyperborea (as well as his 'mini-cycles'
about Poseidonis, Xiccarph, and Mars), but Averoigne needs the most
immediate attention, since it has suffered surprising critical
neglect.

Haunted Averoigne: Klarkash-Ton Meets the Real
World

Averoigne lies in Southern France. Don't look for it on any real world maps. It
no longer exists, and perhaps never did. It has one major town, the
walled city of Vyones, the seat of the Archbishop and home to a
magnificent cathedral. The other important towns and villages are
Ximes, Périgon, Frenâie, Sainte Zenobie, Moulins, Les Hiboux, and
Touraine. The best road in the province travels between Vyones in the
north and Ximes in the south. The Abbey of Périgon is the main source
of learning, and the Abbot's library contains an impressive collection
of rare tomes. The river Isoile wends through the center of the
province and empties out in a marsh to the south. The most important
feature of Averoigne is the thick forest that covers most of the
center of the province and gives the region its sinister repute. Other
places in Averoigne with sorcerous reputations are the ruined castles
of Fausseflammes and Ylrougne.

Smith sprinkles details about the province throughout the stories,
although the most straightforward portrait appears in "The Maker of
Gargoyles":

At that time, the year of our Lord,
1138, Vyones was the principle town of the province of Averoigne. On
two sides the great, shadow-haunted forest, a place of equivocal
legends, of loups-garous and phantoms, approached to the very walls
and flung its umbrage upon them at early forenoon and evening. On the
other sides there lay cultivated fields, and gentle streams that
meandered among willows or poplars, and roads that ran through an open
plain to the high châteaux of noble lords and to regions beyond
Averoigne.

The term 'haunted' is applied frequently to the region. For reasons
unknown, Averoigne suffers from intrusions of supernatural creatures.
Sorcery, although illegal as in all of medieval Europe, lurks in many
places, even within the church. The people tolerate a few astrologers
and dabblers in the magical arts, but many sorcerers have evil agendas
and utilize power described as 'diabolical' and hold converse with
infernal creatures.

One reason that Averoigne has received less exposure than Hyperborea
and Zothique and Smith's other supernormal creations is its mundane
nature. Not only is Averoigne located in real history, it also plays
host to already hoary fantasy and horror concepts: vampires,
werewolves, spooky forests, time-travel, and witches. Smith's
description of the haunted woods of the province could match any
medieval villager's fearful rumors about his own local forbidding
forest:

…the gnarled and immemorial wood
possessed an ill-repute among the peasantry. Somewhere in this wood
there was the ruinous and haunted Château des Faussesflammes; and,
also, there was a double tomb with which the Sieur Hugh du Malinbois
and his chatelaine, who were notorious for sorcery in their time, had
lain unconsecrated for more than two hundred years. Of these, and
their phantoms, there were grisly tales; and there were stories of
loup-garous [werewolves] and goblins, of fays and devils and vampires
that infested Averoigne. But these tales Gérard had given little heed,
considering it improbable that such creatures would fare abroad in
open daylight. ("A Rendezvous in Averoigne")

Compare this to some of Smith's other fantasy cycles: In Hyperborea an
ordinary merchant can have the name Avoosl Wuthoqquan, and a lost
solider named Ralibar Vooz can meet a succession of grotesque gods
with names like Tsathoggua and Atlach-Nacha. In Zothique, starting
your name with two 'M's, like Mmatmuor, and raising an army of the
dead just for the hell of it aren't considered unusual. Meanwhile, in
Averoigne a man named Gérard gets lost in the woods and meets some
vampires. No wonder this medieval French province often drops off the
'weirdness scale' that people use to judge the works of Clark Ashton
Smith.

In terms of memorable tales, the Averoigne cycle also falls behind
Hyperborea et al. Zothique was Smith's strongest artistic series,
while its connections to H. P. Lovecraft's 'Mythos' and its cynical
humor have made Hyperborea much more interesting to fans. Averoigne,
however, does have a quality other of the author's stories lack: a
familiar setting. When the weird occurs in Averoigne, it has a greater
impact because it happens in a realistic, naturalistic environment.
Perhaps because of this connection to the real world, Averoigne often
features more earthy human emotions, in particular love and its
corollary, lust. Romance takes a greater role in the Averoigne stories
than it does anywhere else in the Smith canon, and in places a genuine
feel of courtly love appears (leavened with doses of lust, of course).
"The Enchantress of Sylaire" and "The Holiness of Azédarac" champion
love over other forces. On the flip side of romance, lust dominates
"The End of the Story," "The Satyr," and has hideous repercussions in
"The Maker of Gargoyles" and "Mother of Toads."

Smith also uses the historical setting to engage in religious satire.
A number of his other stories, particularly those set in Hyperborea,
have satiric-edged humor; but Averoigne provides an actual target: the
medieval Catholic Church. The priests of Averoigne come across as an
underwhelming force that cannot cope effectively with the horrors and
magic of Averoigne. Smith takes pleasure in subjecting the clergy to
debauchery and sinister magic that shifts their worldview upside down:
"The Colossus of Ylourgne" and "The Disinterment of Venus" take sharp
slashes at the clergy's myopia and helplessness. In one of the most
intelligent of the stories, "The Beast of Averoigne," religion and
science meet each other, and religion comes up dangerously short.

The medieval milieu nudges the Averoigne cycle into the familiar realm
of heroic fantasy. Smith never wrote pure epic fantasy or
sword-and-sorcery, but with stories like "The Colossus of Ylourgne,"
"The Holiness of Azédarac," and "The Enchantress of Sylaire," he came
quite close. Few writers have overtly imitated Smith's mixture of
science/fantasy/horror from his Zothique, Martian, and other planetary
tales (Jack Vance excepted), but the werewolf-infested woods and
vampire-haunted castles of Averoigne presage countless later dark
fantasies set in medieval locations.

Smith completed eleven Averoigne stories, of which all but one
appeared in Weird Tales during his lifetime. In the following
overview, I have placed the stories in the order that Smith arranged
them in his "Black Book," a chronicle he kept of his short fiction.
Smith wanted the Averoigne stories published in book forum as The
Averoigne Chronicles, although it is unclear if this is the exact
order he wanted them presented (they fall roughly into the order of
composition). The only completed story he excluded from the list is
"The Enchantress of Sylaire," which he wrote during a later phase in
his career. I have placed it at the end, where I believe the author
himself might have slotted it. Smith also included in his list titles
for which only synopses exist, and I have placed these at the end of
this hypothetical The Averoigne Chronicles as a form of
"appendices."

The Averoigne Chronicles

"The End of the Story"

First published in Weird Tales, May 1930.

Smith nominally dates this story as occurring in 1787, making it the
only Averoigne story to take place outside of the Middle Ages or the
early Renaissance. However, the historical setting matters little, and
nothing distinguishes it from the Averoigne of earlier years.

This first story set the unusual tone for the rest of the Averoigne
chronicles: supernatural horror tempered with romance and sexuality,
with a few hints of religious satire. Superficially, "The End of the
Story" is a horror tale that adheres to a familiar storyline: an
antiquarian, in this case a young law student named Christophe Morand,
finds a forbidden old volume of lore that tempts him into the clutches
of an ancient evil. This plot structure appeared repeatedly in the
horror works of M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft. Yet nothing horrific
ever appears before the eyes of narrator Christophe, at least not that
he lives to record. For him, this is a love story. The dark hints of
what may dwell beneath the Château of Fausseflammes and Abbot
Hilaire's revelation about the true nature of the exquisite lady Nycea
are at worst mere annoyances to Christophe and at best an urge to
uncover more. Smith's writing centers on the beautiful, idyllic, and
tragically vanished instead of the grotesque; the scenes of Christophe
emerging into the illusionary world of Nycea have a Hellenistic
exoticism, and Christophe's attraction to Nycea feels genuine instead
of the demonic delusion that the stuffy abbot Hilaire insists it
is.

Christophe strives to know 'the end of the story' he finds in the
forbidden book of the Abbey of Périgon, but ironically we never
discover the end of his story—although we can certainly guess
it. Smith used a similar device of a man who escapes a horrible fate,
only to find himself willfully driven into its clutches again—with
unseen results—in his Martian story, "The Vault of the Yoh-Vombis."
Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" has a similar reversal
coda.

This is the only place in the Averoigne cycle where the clergy appears
to wield any power against supernatural evil. Smith later portrays
priests, monks, and bishops as either helpless aesthetes who turn
every problem over to God, or else as cynical co-conspirators with
dark forces. Abbot Hilaire successfully repels a vampire with holy
water, but in "The Colossus of Ylourgne" demonic figures actually
seize sacred implements and beat the monks with them in a
mocking turnabout. Although the Averoigne stories use Judeo-Christian
epithets for evil forces, Smith gives no proof of the existence of
supreme deities of either good or evil.

"The Satyr"

First published in Genius Loci (Arkham House, 1948)

This is the shortest of the Averoigne chronicles and never appeared in
the pages of Weird Tales, probably because of the hints of
carnal lust and sexuality that underlie the appearance of a lecherous
Pan-like figure and a forest with 'obscene' shapes that ignites
passionate feelings between a pair of adulterous lovers. The Arthur
Machen novella The Great God Pan and short story "The White
People" may have influenced Smith, but his story again has the aura of
courtly romance that clings peculiarly to Averoigne, and therefore a
sense of genuine horror never blooms. The touches of genuine romance
between the couple are the spark of this otherwise simple and quick
fable.

Smith wrote an alternate ending to the story with a gruesome and even
more sexual outcome. He cut it, perhaps, to make it more saleable (and
apparently failed). The variant conclusion reads marginally better,
since it combines the sex and violence inherent in the nature of Pan.

"A Rendezvous in Averoigne"

First published in Weird Tales, April/May 1931

This story bequeathed its name to a 1988 Arkham House collection of
Smith's stories and has seen more reprints than any of the other
Averoigne tales, most likely because it deals with a standard monster
with which most readers are familiar: the vampire. The traditional
medieval European backdrop of Averoigne allowed Smith to utilize the
customary monsters of fable more than in his more supermundane
settings: aside from vampires, satyrs, gargoyles, and werewolves all
make appearances. Fans of the writer's stranger inventions might find
this story too familiar and simplistic, but the magic of his
prose still weaves an ensnaring web around the standard plotting.

A romantic tryst provides the catalyst to lure a troubadour named
Gérard into the forest of Averoigne and to a mysterious castle. The
castle's tenants, Sieur de Malinbois and his chatelaine Agathe, heap
hospitality on Gérard, his lover Fleurette, and her two servants, but
a dim memory of the legend of two foul long-dead sorcerers with
similar names makes Gérard believe that his hosts have something
malign planned. The rest of the tale resorts to the vampire clichés of
red marks on necks, a hidden tomb, a stake in the heart, and waving
holy objects. Stylistically however, this is one of the most
beautifully readable of the stories, walking the border between the
lighthearted romantic ambitions of Gérard to rescue his beloved
Fleurette and the eerie depiction of the mysterious castle of Sieur de
Malinbois, where flames are still as "tapers that burn for the dead in
a windless vault," and from the stifling air creeps "forth a mustiness
of hidden vaults and embalmed centurial corruption."

"The Maker of Gargoyles"

First published in Weird Tales, August 1932

In Averoigne there's love, and then there's lust. "The Maker of
Gargoyles" has a surprising amount of the latter for a Weird
Tales story, considering the truncation of Smith's later "Mother
of Toads" and editor Farnsworth Wright's dislike of Robert E. Howard's
rapine-minded "The Frost Giant's Daughter." Taking psychoanalysis into
his mythical region of France, Smith turns the hatred and lust of an
unpleasant stonemason in the city of Vyones into two stone gargoyles
that come to life and terrorize the population at night. Readers can
take it as a straightforward horror story about a man who gets his
comeuppance from his own creations, but the sexual content—again
described in 'saturnine' and 'satyr' terms—makes it stand out. Smith
also maintains good suspense in the finale.

"The Holiness of Azédarac"

First published in Weird Tales, November 1933

This story has more humor than usual for a Smith's prose (outside of
the sardonic comedy of the Hyperborea series). He takes many satiric
jabs, mostly at religion, but also at himself and his fellow
correspondent from Weird Tales. Villain Azédarac is a comic
sorcerer who rants about his devilish contacts like a name-dropper at
a Hollywood party. The first few pages contain a cornucopia of weird
gods, some borrowed from Lovecraft and Howard: "By the Ram with a
Thousand Ewes! By the tail of Dagon and the Horns of Derecto!" On that
note, the rest of the story reads something like a high romantic lark,
and along with "The Enchantress of Sylaire" is the cheeriest of the
stories; indeed, it ranks as one of brightest pieces that Smith wrote,
overcoming his customary pessimism. He suggests that love is the
ultimate retreat, even when all else fails, and all the crimes of
horrible men mean nothing when you have a pair of loving and lusting
arms wrapped around you.

The story takes a non-science-fiction approach to time travel.
Azédarac, Bishop of Ximes and a diabolical sorcerer who has covered up
his demonic rituals for years, uses his magic to send the monk who can
expose his activities backwards in time seven hundred years to 475
C.E. There the poor monk finds unexpected help—and even more
unexpected romance—from a pagan sorceress. This plot contains tropes
appropriate to heroic fantasy: An evil sorcerer sends an assassin to
get rid of a spy, a band of pagans tries to sacrifice the hero,
there's a scene in a rough-and-tumble tavern, and the heroine is a
bewitching sorceress. Smith clearly takes the side of paganism and its
unbridled sexuality over the strict mores of medieval Catholicism. The
story's sarcastic title and the character of Azédarac are also satiric
shots at the church. Azédarac mostly serves a comic purpose. He rants
ridiculously with a froth of demonic names bubbling from his lips, but
he seems more like a low-level office bureaucrat who's afraid his
manager will discover he has started embezzling from the company
picnic fund. Compare him to the sorcerer Nathaire in "The Colossus of
Ylourgne," whom Smith portrays with maximum menace and minimum irony.

"The Colossus of Ylourgne"

First published in Weird Tales, June 1933

This novelette is among the longest works that Smith published,
running over 14,000 words, and in it the author achieves a near
masterful epic of dark fantasy. Grisly images of necromancy, tomb-born
terror, and gruesome destruction appear throughout, but instead of
Grand Guignol horror, the end result is a heroic fantasy adventure—and
close to sword-and-sorcery in the modern sense. If hero Gaspard du
Nord, one of the few examples of a truly heroic character in Smith's
fiction, had picked up a sword at some point, "The Colossus of
Ylourgne" would immediately qualify as sword-and-sorcery. There are
striking similarities between it and Robert E. Howard's then-emerging
fantasy stories taking place in mythic pre-histories. The mix of
Smith's dark word magic with the heroic adventure make this one of his
prose masterpieces and the jewel in the crown of Averoigne.

Given the longer length of the piece, Smith weaves a more intricate
plot than usual and uses the template of a hero going against an evil
sorcerer with a super-villain scheme. In 1281, the ailing necromancer
Nathaire flees from the city of Vyones and plots ghastly vengeance
from the ruined castle of Ylourgne before he dies. Gaspard du Nord,
Nathaire's former disciple, learns from his visitation to Ylourgne
that Nathaire has summoned fresh corpses from all over Averoigne to
serve as raw material for the making of a one hundred foot-tall dead
body into which he will transfer his spirit…and then flatten all of
Averoigne. It falls on du Nord to find a way to stop him.

Smith has more going on here than an exciting adventure and the lure
of necromantic imagery (in which he indulges with delightful
gluttony). The religious satire that weaves through the Averoigne
cycle reaches its apotheosis here. Nathaire, in the form of the
Colossus, vents his anger predominantly against the clergy and their
icons, who can do nothing but pray hopelessly or flee. The Colossus
looms as a titanic blasphemy that holds dominance over the symbols of
Christianity, and it only falls to the forces of another wielder of
forbidden magic, who ironically posts himself on the top of the
Cathedral of Vyones to face his adversary.

"The Colossus of Ylourgne" also contains a rare mention of the events
in another story. Gaspard du Nord, while climbing up into Vyones
Cathedral, hides behind a gargoyle with features identical to the
lustful stone carving that tormented the city over a hundred and fifty
years ago in "The Maker of Gargoyles."

"The Mandrakes"

First published in Weird Tales, February 1933

From the epic tale of the Colossus, Smith dives down to the simple
fable of "The Mandrakes," which resembles Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black
Cat." It's a short and unremarkable story about a sorcerer
specializing in love potions who murders his wife and finds strangely
feminine-shaped mandrakes growing over her hidden grave. Even Smith's
trademark writing style feels stale and underused, but the link
between lust and violence and the theme of the souring of love are
further examples of the earthy opportunities that the Averoigne
setting offered to the writer.

"The Beast of Averoigne"

Shorter version first published in Weird Tales, May 1933

Science fiction lands in Averoigne. Smith takes the alien invasion
plot and drops it into the Middle Ages, where religion has no ability
to comprehend it except in hoary diabolical terms and can do nothing
against it. Only a budding scientist—still cursed with the terms
'sorcerer' and 'astrologer'—can hope to achieve anything. The
similarities to "The Colossus of Ylourgne" show up immediately, but
"The Beast of Averoigne" places itself more firmly in the
science-fiction realm. Smith also experiments with a three-part
narrative that might have taken inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft's
similarly divided "The Call of Cthulhu."

Three different documents tell the story of coming of the baleful
Beast of Averoigne in the year 1369. Gerome, a monk of the abbey of
Périgon (already explored twice in previous stories), writes an
account of his first meeting with the bizarre, snake-like creature
that appears in conjunction with a comet in the sky and begins a reign
of terror. A letter from the Abbot of Périgon, Théophile, to his niece
in a convent relates the further depredations of the creature across
the countryside; the Abbot voices his own doubts about his mind.
Finally, the sorcerer-astrologer Luc Le Chaudronnier writes a
statement about his effort to kill the Beast—which he has come to
recognize is a creature not from the Earth—with the power of Ring of
Eibon, a artifact which (Smith hints) contains another
extraterrestrial entity of great power.

At the finale, Luc le Chaudronnier comes close to a true understanding
of the identity of the Beast of Averoigne when he breaks free from the
bond of the terrestrial thinking and its conception of religious good
and evil:

Indeed, it were well that none should
believe [this] story: for strange abominations pass evermore between
earth and moon and athwart the galaxies; and the gulf is haunted by
that which it were madness for men to know. Unnameable things have
come to us in alien horror, and shall come again. And the evil of the
stars is not as the evil of the earth.

The story cannot match "The Colossus of Ylourgne" in excitement, but
the flawless use of three medieval voices and the fascinating
collision between science and religion make this one of the most
intriguing of the Averoigne chronicles.

Two version of the story exist. After Farnsworth Wright at Weird
Tales rejected the original, Smith shortened it and dropped the
triptych style, making the entire story the account of Luc Le
Chaudronnier and integrating the earlier events into his testimony.
The strongest elements of the original remain, but some of the
complexity and vanishes. The loss of the individual voice of Abbot
Théophile in his letter to his sister takes away the specter of
personal tragedy. However, comparing the two versions does give an
interesting picture of Smith's revision process and which elements he
chose to highlight and which to discard.

"The Disinterment of Venus"

First published in Weird Tales, July 1934

This brief tale about the monks of Périgon (yes, them again) exhuming
a lewd statue of Venus misses a number of opportunities for lusty,
erotic satire, but Smith cannot take the blame for it: more explicit
material would never have made it into print in the 1930s. That still
cannot keep the reader from wondering what Smith could have done with
the lustier elements if he had written them today, in the age of Anne
Rice. The concept of an austere monastery falling into lecherous
debauchery because of an erotic statue conjures up comic and horrific
possibilities, but Smith can realize none of them under the publishing
restraints of the time. A few of the monks spend a night drinking in a
tavern, and that marks the limits of their carousing. Smith also plays
briefly with the notion that the uncovered Venus represents not the
classical goddess, but her earthier 'chthonic' form—the darker and
bawdier part of Greek religion that rarely gets taught in high school.

"Mother of Toads"

First published in Weird Tales, July 1938, in an expurgated
version.

Smith occasionally wrote gruesome and nauseous horror stories that
prey on the readers' senses. "The Mother of Toads," like the similar
freakish "The Seed from the Sepulchre," works on a primarily revolting
level. It's the least likable of the Averoigne stories, but Smith's
ability to repulse is quite astonishing. It raises the lust theme of
the Averoigne cycle to new heights: lust as a sickening, smothering
murderer. It is no surprise that Weird Tales forced Smith to
gut the story of its salacious and nasty sexual passages before it
appeared in the magazine four years after he originally wrote it.

Mere Antoinette, a grotesque witch who lives in the southern swamps,
seduces the young messenger-boy Pierre with one of her potions. The
lascivious descriptions of the enchantment and lovemaking (slashed
entirely from the Weird Tales version) have a slimy repugnance
that equals anything Smith wrote:

This time he did not draw away but
met her with hot, questing hands when she pressed heavily against him.
Her limbs were cool and moist; her breasts yielded like the
turf-mounds above a bog. Her body was white and wholly hairless; but
here and there he found curious roughness…like those on the skin of a
toad…that somehow sharpened his desire instead of repelling it.

She was so huge that his fingers barely joined behind her. His two
hands, together, were equal only to the cupping of a single
breast….The couch was rude and bare. But the flesh of the sorceress
was like deep, luxurious cushions…

Mere Antoinette's hideous revenge against Pierre's eventual rejection
of her feels tame compared to the descriptions of their amorous
encounters!

But buried in this squeamish tale of magic-induced lewdness is a
morsel of regret. Mere Antoinette, for all her repulsive physical
characteristics, only wants the male attraction she knows she can
never attain legitimately. Even though readers understand Pierre's
horror and denial of her, that cannot keep them from sympathizing with
the 'Mother of Toads' in her loneliness.

"The Enchantress of Sylaire"

First published in Weird Tales, July 1941

Clark Ashton Smith abruptly stopped writing fiction in 1935 after
completing what he conceived of as his final Zothique tale, "The Last
Hieroglyph." He did periodically return to short fiction for the rest
of his life (he died in 1961), and wrote additional stories both of
Zothique and Hyperborea. But he wrote only one further entry in the
Averoigne chronicles: this charming fantasy that crosses the borders
of fairytale and sword-and-sorcery. At the end of the stories of
Averoigne, love conquerors all, and a hero even draws a sword to
defend his love against a slavering monster.

Young dreamer Anselme, with his devotion to beauty and books and
romance, might stand for Clark Ashton Smith himself, or at least for
many of his readers:

He seated himself on one of the
boulders, musing on the strange happiness that had entered his life so
unexpectedly. It was like one of the old romances, the tales of glamor
and fantasy, that he had loved to read. Smiling, he remembered the
gibes with which Dorothées de Flèches had expressed her disapproval of
his taste for such reading-matter. What, he wondered, would Dorothée
think now?

Anselme, after the pretty but haughty Dorothée rejects him, stumbles
into the faery region of Sylaire and its lovely sorceress Sephora. The
smitten Anselme helps Sephora defeat the werewolf Malachie du Marais,
and at the end it is Anselme who must reject Dorothée for the true
love of Sephora. The courtly romance is startling for Smith, as is the
aspect of heroic fantasy, but a genuine optimism infuses the story and
makes it the most likable of all the Averoigne chronicles and a
fitting end for the cycle—whether Smith intended it as the last story
or not. The final sentence is one of the most optimistic and romantic
that the author ever wrote.

Fragments and Synopses

These eleven stories are the only completed works of Averoigne, but
Smith kept extensive notes for others in his "Black Book." Titles and
synopses for other chronicles in the haunted French province survive:
"The Sorceress of Averoigne," "Queen of the Sabbat," a sequel to "The
Holiness of Azédarac" called "The Doom of Azédarac," "The Oracle of
Sadoqua," and "The Werewolf of Averoigne." The titles alone can
quicken the heart of any reader of Clark Ashton Smith and give
glimpses of the further wonders that might have emerged.

One of the synopses, "The Doom of Azédarac," shows that Smith planned
to further explore science-fiction concepts in Averoigne. The evil
sorcerer-bishop Azédarac, on the verge of death, transports himself
across dimensions to an alternate Averoigne and battles a version of
himself in a duel. This story would have pushed the Averoigne cycle
into the realms of hypothetical contemporary science.

The other intriguing synopsis that survives is "The Oracle of
Sadoqua." The outline takes place during the Roman occupation of
Gaul, when Averoigne is known as "Averonia." A Roman officer,
Horatius, searches for his lost friend Galbius and finds him in a cave
where the vapors of the breath of the pagan god Sadoqua (possibly a
reference to the toad-god entity Tsathoggua in the Hyperborea stories)
slowly devolve him into a hideous beast. Horatius also has an
encounter with a beautiful pagan girl, indicating that Smith planned
to also explore the romantic/erotic aspect of Averoigne in the story.
The strong potential of a lengthy story early in Averoigne's history,
possibly explaining the origin of the weirdness of the region and
containing doses of Lovecraftian horror, makes this another
unfortunate case of an idea never coming to fruition.

Postscript

The complete Averoigne stories do not necessarily show Clark Ashton
Smith at his bizarre best, and stories like "The Mandrakes" and "The
Disinterment of Venus" will never rank as more than minor works.
However, Averoigne's conception as an historical environment makes it
one of the most intriguing of Smith's settings. And, perhaps, the one
that would have worked the best if he had written it today. The
stories show an earthy eroticism that begs to be cut loose from the
censored constraints of the 1930s. In the erotic fantasy and dark
horror market of today, Averoigne would make an ideal setting. The
shadows of religious satire could also broaden in the modern writing
scene. Perhaps the seeds of Averoigne were planted too early to flower
properly.

Of course, fans of Klarkash-Ton might find it tempting to travel to
Averoigne and create their own stories. I, myself, have often wondered
about the succubi that Smith often mentions, and I have felt the
sorcerous enchantment of the werewolf-haunted forests luring me to set
my pen to paper and bring Averoigne back from the dusty parchments of
the library of the Abbot of Périgon.…

Part II of my continuing analysis of the series stories
of Clark Ashton Smith will turn to his "Book of Hyperborea."

About the Author

Ryan Harvey is the Managing Editor of Sword and Sorcery. He has
lived most of his life in Los Angeles, although
he attended Carleton College in Minnesota where he studied
Medieval History, Classical Islam, and Film. He considers himself a
full-fledged writer, with three completed novels, but has supplemented
his income at various times as a speed reading instructor, reading
development teacher, and magazine copyeditor. When not absorbing
mounds of science fiction and fantasy literature and indulging in
pulp, he swing dances wearing bizarre 1930s clothing. He also maintains his
own website: The Realm of Ryan.